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With so much talk of asteroids and comets lately I thought it'd be a good time to post this amazing artifact from the past. It's actually not from the very distant past, but it's data from the first framing CCD cameras sent into space, ...

An experimental two-ton spaceplane designed to demonstrate technologies required to return spacecraft from Earth orbit splashed down in the Pacific Ocean this morning after a successful, 100-minute test flight. The European Space Agency&...

Description: The IXV spaceplane, designed to demonstrate reentry technologies, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean this morning after a successful, 100-minute test flight.

Here's two more items from Tuesday's flyby of comet Tempel 1 by the Stardust spacecraft to add to my previous roundup of Tempel 1 data. The first represents data from a dust counting instrument, portrayed as sound:
I asked co-inv...

Description: Here's two more items from Tuesday's flyby of comet Tempel 1 by the Stardust spacecraft to add to my previous roundup of Tempel 1 data. The first represents data from a dust counting instrument, portrayed as sound, and the second is a terrific morph animation of the flyby produced by Daniel Macháček.

In my most recent post on Chandrayaan-1 I mentioned the first results from the RADOM experiment, provided to the Indian mission by the nation of Bulgaria. I also mentioned that "I don't know anything about Bulgaria's previous contributi...

This week the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is meeting in Long Beach. An astonishing fact about the 2013 meeting of the AAS: 30% of all the talks at this meeting are on exoplanets.Just let that sink in for a moment. It wasn't that ...

Description: This year's American Astronomical Society meeting featured tons and tons of news on exoplanets. They're everywhere! And not just planets, but also asteroids, comets, and more....

After Kevin was Jacque Blamont of CNES talking about sending balloons to Venus, Mars, and Titan. The principle of flying balloons has been known since 1783 - but they're not a particularly efficient way of carrying a payload around. ...

EDIT: I have now posted a single-image version of the scale asteroids and comets montage for your downloading pleasure. --ESLThe longer I listened to the "great planet debate" last week, the more strongly I felt that if it were up to me,...

Description: Things that probably won't ever be called planets, but maybe they should

Update, 2-11 5:00 p.m. EST: SpaceX has scrubbed the attempt to land their Falcon 9 rocket's first stage on the drone ship, citing three-story-high waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
Update, 2-10 6:00 p.m. EST: The launch of DSCOVR was scrubb...

Description: Within a two-day span, two rocket launches and three ocean landings are scheduled—one of which involves an autonomous spaceport drone ship.

During the afternoon poster session at the Division of Planetary Sciences / European Planetary Science Congress meeting, I had a long talk with Ludmila Zasova (IKI) about Russia's Venera-D mission to Venus. It has been pushed back to 201...

Description: During the afternoon poster session at the Division of Planetary Sciences / European Planetary Science Congress meeting, I had a long talk with Ludmila Zasova (IKI) about Russia's Venera-D mission to Venus.

At the end of last week, a rather sensational article appeared in both the Russian- and English-language sites of the Russian news agency, RIA Novosti. "Life Spotted on Venus - Russian Scientist," ran the English headline; a Google trans...

Description: At the end of last week, a rather sensational article appeared in both the Russian- and English-language sites of the Russian news agency, RIA Novosti. "Life Spotted on Venus - Russian Scientist," ran the English headline; a Google translation of the Russian one goes: "The Soviet probes may have photographed creatures on Venus."